National Cycle
Manufacturing Firm Assembles Multiple Solutions Through Single StoreVault S500
Customer Overview
National Cycle, Inc. is the world leader in motorcycle windshield manufacturing, and is the OEM supplier to BMW, Harley-Davidson, Honda, Kawasaki, Polaris, Suzuki, Triumph, and Yamaha. Founded in 1937, they have developed more innovations and holds more patents for the design and production of windshields than any other company in the industry. Their IT environment had an immediate need for more storage, but an underlying broader need to solve storage related issues.
Customer Challenges
The difficulties that David J. Young, the IT Director, faced were diverse and varied. Management pains from older DAS deployments, simplifying user credential management, reducing licensing, reducing data duplication, improving backup frequency and allowing for future growth were all criteria on his list. Half of his storage was on an NT 4.0 server and half was on a Novell server, with Macintosh graphics files chewing up disk space faster than a speeding sportbike. In addition, 12 hour manufacturing shifts meant
24x6 network utilization and a very small backup window with no room for errors. He could have continued to band-aid his current systems, but chose to invest in network storage systems, software and disk backup products that would address all of his issues in a few simple steps.
Solution
National Cycle had been thoroughly researching and was excited to hear that NetApp had introduced a new line of products for small businesses. They concluded that a networked storage device and a Virtual Tape Library device with backup software that tied them all together would really make a difference. Centralizing and consolidating storage onto a StoreVault, with RAID-DP™ and snapshots, meant that data was protected, scalable and avoided spending on unnecessary disk capacity. CommVault's Galaxy Express software became the "glue" that connected the StoreVault and the virtual tape library, and provided one central point of control for all backup and recovery exercises. Leveraging industry standards like NDMP meant that the entire solution was efficient, simple to use and affordable.
Customer Experience
The installation of the StoreVault S500 was easy and fast and the system was quickly up and sharing data. The exciting part was connecting to the VTL appliance. Galaxy Express saw the VTL through the StoreVault and data flowed freely between these diverse systems from different vendors along the most efficient paths. Reseller USI suggested the pairing of CommVault Galaxy Express with the StoreVault as a part of the solution, a recommendation that added superior technology to the solution at an aggressive price for National Cycle.
Customer Benefits
- Flexibility to add and allocate storage on the fly with the reliability of RAID-DP and a global hot spare
- One single storage device to manage, replacing various RAID controllers and servers
- Integration into a mixed client environment with Client Access License reduction and simplified account management
- Disk to disk to tape backups controlled from a central point
- Data duplication reduction and eliminated server over-provisioning "just in case"
- Software integration that manages multiple data protection technologies under one umbrella
As Dave puts it, "We met or exceeded the goals of the project & addressed all of our issues. We saved on software licensing. We improved our disaster recovery capability and increased our backup frequency. We simplified our environment. Above all, we vastly improved our agility responding to future storage changes."
"The purchase of the StoreVault S500 dovetailed perfectly with our Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape backup strategy; and the price point of the CommVault Galaxy Express software bundled with the StoreVault S500 fit quite nicely with our implementation of a VTL appliance."
National Cycle
2200 Maywood Drive
Maywood, IL 60153
708-343-0400
www.nationalcycle.com
